{"author":"Knut Hamsun","author_id":"Knut+Hamsun","total_quotes":24,"quotes":[{"text":"But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe….","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["believing","faith"],"id":33420,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman. ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature!","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["hypocrisy","tolstoy"],"id":48150,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["food-for-thought"],"id":58215,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"You are right; I am not good at moving in society. Be merciful. You do not understand me; I live in the woods by choice--that is my happiness. Here, where I am all alone, it can hurt no one that I am as I am; but when I go among others, I have to use all my will power to be as I should.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["anti-social-instincts","eremiticism","solitude","woods"],"id":62757,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["genius","greatness","leadership","politics"],"id":64859,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"And here we go creating great men out of artisans who happened to have stumbled on a way to improve electrical apparatus or pedal through Sweden on a bicycle! And we solicit great men to write books promoting the cult of other great men! It's really very funny, and worth the price of admission! It will all end up with every village having his own great man - a lawyer, a novelist, and a polar explorer of immense stature! And the world will become wonderfully flat and simple and easy to master . . .","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["genius","greatness"],"id":68964,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"They walked away from the sea, Rolandsen in the lead. He kept to the edge of the road, in the snow, to leave room for the others. He was wearing light, fashionable shoes, but seemed unperturbed; he even had his coat unbuttoned in the chilly May wind. ’So that’s the church!’ said the curate. ’It looks old. I don’t suppose there’s a stove in it?’ asked his wife. ’I couldn’t say,’ Rolandsen replied, ’but I don’t think so.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["attitude","religion-spirituality"],"id":106248,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"Summer is the time for dreaming, and then you have to stop. But some people go on dreaming all their lives, and cannot change.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["dreaming","inspirational","productivity","summer"],"id":115025,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["past","old age","like "],"id":117732,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"},{"text":"An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... A wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.","author":"Knut Hamsun","tags":["nature"],"id":214007,"author_id":"Knut+Hamsun"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}